River pirates, sneak thieves, pickpockets, confidence men—New York City in 1896 was grappling with rising rates of relatively new crimes that threatened the safety of Gilded Age Gotham.
But tthe city’s police force, led by robust crimefighter Theodore Roosevelt, decided to crack down on another troubling offense: discarded banana peels on public roadways.
No, it wasn’t a gag invented by vaudeville theater and silent films. People in the turn of the century city really did used to slip on banana peels tossed into the gutter, often resulting in serious injuries.
Stories of pedestrians felled by slimy, mushy, days-old “banana skins” regularly made headlines.
“David P. Cardel, aged 60, of No. 42 Vandewater Street, stepped on a banana-skin at the corner of Houston and Mott Street last night, slipped and fell, striking his head on the curb,” the New York Times reported in 1878. “He was taken to the Chambers Street Hospital in a dying condition.”
“Mrs. Theresa Hafensberg, of No. 135 Boerum Street, slipped on a piece of banana peel near her residence yesterday afternoon, and falling sprained her left hip,” stated the Brooklyn Eagle in an 1883 article headlined “The Baneful Banana Peel.”
Bananas weren’t the only thing New Yorkers slipped on as they navigated the city.
The streets and sidewalks were notoriously filthy—the resting place for rotting discarded fruit and other perishable foods, not to mention horse manure and dead animals.
But now that the once-exotic banana had become a popular street food sold by vendors from wood carts across the city, enormous numbers of peels would be tossed carelessly, posing a hazard to unseeing pedestrians.
Newspapers began to call for some kind of action.
“Now that a young man has broken his leg by a fall caused by stepping on a banana skin, the police ought to be instructed to look out for people who peel bananas in the street and fling down their skin,” wrote the New York Herald in January 1896.
A month later, Roosevelt (third image) began his “war on the banana skin,” as the New York Times dubbed it.
After assembling police captains, sergeants, and roundsmen, Roosevelt “read from the city ordinance about those who littered fruit or vegetables in the street, noting they could be fined up to $5.00,” explained the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.
Offenders would also “serve 10 days in jail . . . he told the police officers to enforce those laws regarding litter and clean up the streets.”
Five dollars in 1896 would be about $200 today, per the TR Presidential Library.
It wasn’t just police enforcement of the littering ordinance that made a difference. The city’s ineffective Department of Street Cleaning gained a new leader, George Waring, a Civil War colonel and sanitary engineer.
Waring revamped the department and mandated that the men where white uniforms to signal hygiene and cleanliness—hence their nickname, the White Wings.
Under Waring’s guidance, the White Wings helped clean up New York’s streets of all kinds of litter, including banana peels.
Of course, discarded banana peels didn’t disappear completely. Litter will always be with us in New York, and pedestrians continued to slip, fall, and injure themselves.
But as the 20th century approached, victims began taking the now-routine step of filing a lawsuit—as one passenger did after he attempted to board an elevated train in 1900 and was tripped up by a banana peel on a stairway.
[Top image: Wikipedia; second image: The Plano Conservatory at the Interurban; third image: Alice Austen via NYPL Digital Collections; fourth image: Evening World; fifth image: Fine Art Storehouse]